Wealth of material

THE fact that works from Venice have found their way to WA is because of the gallery's new director, Stefano Carboni, a native of La Serenissima.

PERTH is a long way from Venice, and the fact a selection of works from the Guggenheim collection there has found its way to the Art Gallery of Western Australia is because of the connections of the gallery's new director, Stefano Carboni, a native of La Serenissima.

The exhibition is also part of a broader initiative, the first in an annual series called Great Collections of the World, which should help to broaden what has recently been rather an uninspiring exhibiting program.

There is, however, a connection between Perth, the capital of the mining boom, whose city centre looks like a country town turning into Dubai, and the Guggenheims, who in the 19th century became unimaginably rich as owners of silver, lead and copper mines across the world. Peggy's father inherited vast wealth but managed to squander most of it before he died in the sinking of the Titanic. As a result, Peggy inherited a relatively modest personal fortune; she was independent but had nothing like the resources of her uncle Solomon, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Like many rich people, she was drawn to artists. In hindsight, the figure of the artist has perhaps never been more fetishised than in the first half of the 20th century, when the romantic model of the solitary hero or martyr coincided with a loss of any effective role in society, so that the artist became simply a shaman-like figure endowed with a mystical potency. The modernist artist represents something that money can't buy, which is of course the only thing the rich lack.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), a self-professed art addict, was initially a dealer as well as a collector. Her London gallery in Cork Street, Guggenheim Jeune (an allusion to the famous Parisian Galerie Bernheim-Jeune), showed such artists as Cocteau, Kandinsky and the surrealists from 1938 to 1939. In that year she closed the gallery with the intention of opening a museum, to be directed by Herbert Read, but the outbreak of war interrupted her plans. She spent some time in Paris on a buying spree based on a list by Read revised by Duchamp, then returned to New York, where in 1942 she opened a new gallery, Art of This Century. Three specially designed rooms displayed her collection of abstract, surrealist and kinetic art, while the fourth held works for sale.

Her wartime gallery in New York (1942-47) was significant in the history of modern art, because it introduced European modernism to an American public and also because it was an opportunity for her to become acquainted with and to promote the rising generation of American painters who would dominate the post-war decades.

Guggenheim was among the first to recognise the talent of Jackson Pollock, commissioning him to paint a huge mural for the lobby of her apartment, and then supporting him through a contractual arrangement that -- ironically enough -- allowed him to leave a menial job at her uncle's museum and devote himself to painting.

After the war, Guggenheim moved to Venice, where she bought the enormous but unfinished 18th-century Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal close to the great church of the Salute.

Her collection was shown at the post-war Biennale in 1948, the first time any of the young Americans had been exhibited in Europe, and then travelled to several European cities before being installed in the palace. From 1951, she began to open

Ca' Venier (as it is known in Venetian dialect) to visitors during the summer, and I recall long ago walking through what were still her personal living quarters and admiring the Picassos in the dining room. Towards the end of her life, she decided to leave the property and the collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which today administers the museum.

There are really two kinds of collectors, setting aside investors and those who pay others to buy work of which they are merely the owners. One kind is epitomised by French art historian Louis-Antoine Prat: the kind of collector who has the knowledge and expertise required to discern the valuable or even the authentic. There is also the mitigation of fashion's vagaries through the passing of time, with distance permitting a certain cool detachment.

The collector of contemporary art in any period, on the other hand, does not require erudition or connoisseurship so much as judgment in assessing the quality of new work, in deciding between good and bad in the midst of competing fashions. Personal relationships with artists and dealers are part of the process and part of the satisfaction. Such collectors often become the friends of artists and follow their careers through decades of development.

Guggenheim had an exceptionally personal connection with her artists, most of whom were friends and several of them lovers; her first husband, with whom she had a son and a daughter, was an artist (if today a forgotten one), and her second was Max Ernst, until he left her a few years later for Dorothea Tanning.

She even had an affair with Samuel Beckett before the war. In Venice, she was close to a number of contemporary Italian artists; she installed Tancredi in a basement studio at the palace, but he became the lover of her daughter Pegeen, who was married to Jean Helion, another of her artists.

In 1958 she flirted with Gregory Corso, the beat poet, who had called on her in Venice. He turned her down, but described her sympathetically in a letter to Allen Ginsberg: "Very strange, marvellous lady. Didn't you see that in her? She really is great, and sad, and does need friends. Not all those creepy painters all the time. I kissed her goodbye, while I watched her walk away, I saw that she put her hand to her head as though she were in pain. I suddenly realised the plight of the woman in that gesture. She is a liver of life, and life is fading away. That's all there is to it."

There is something of that melancholy feeling in the exhibition in Perth, partly perhaps because much of the excitement originally attached to these works has faded with time, partly because too many mediocre or even bad works are included -- Tancredi, Bacci and Pizzinato, but also Congdon, Baziotes, Matta -- and partly because of the unappealing spaces in which the works are exhibited.

It is a pity that the show could not have opened with the really outstanding Picasso in the collection, The Poet (1911). Instead, there are two works that are both remarkable in their way, but are certainly less fundamental and also, in a sense, more recondite. Half-length portrait of a man in a striped jersey (1939) is a picture that makes more sense when you realise it is a reduction of an earlier self-portrait, and comes alive when you understand the diagonal on the neck is the cast shadow of the chin with all the tension that implies between abstraction and figuration. The Studio (1928) deals with a familiar theme in Picasso, the relation of artist and model.

There are interesting works by Arp, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Ozenfant, in all of which the linear abstract forms retain a human life and animation, unlike the later style of post-painterly abstraction, because surfaces and edges are done by hand, not with masking tape and rollers or spray-guns. Even the straightest edge is manifestly painted freehand and this gives greater poignancy to the quest for geometric order.

One of the really outstanding pieces in the show is the large surrealist composition by Max Ernst, Attirement of the Bride, painted in 1940. He had been living with the very young Leonora Carrington, who fled to Spain when Ernst was detained as an enemy alien in Vichy on the outbreak of war. Ernst represents himself as the sinister green birdman in the foreground embracing the imperious masked seductress in the centre, who in turn pushes aside a young girl who appears to be running away. It is tempting to see the painting as a kind of allegory of Ernst's transition from Leonora to Peggy, whom he married in 1941.

In its combination of human and animal forms, of patently sexual symbols, such as the broken arrow with its point aimed at the woman's groin, of irrational space and of a luxuriantly artificial textural surface produced by the dabbing on of wet paint with a rag that the surrealists called decalcomania, and even of the disconcerting picture-within-the-picture that echoes the main figure, it amounts to a particularly striking compendium of surrealist concerns.

There are other notable works, such as the mysteriously fluid and almost entirely monochrome landscape by Yves Tanguy, Promontory Palace (1931), and a fine sculpture by Antoine Pevsner, Developable Surface (1938-39). Giacometti's Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932) is a celebrated but particularly unpleasant sculpture, while his mature and more sophisticated style is represented by Piazza (1947-48), in which the tiny and emaciated figures are set, with deliberate incongruity, on a massive base; like people feeling their way tentatively through dense fog, four men circulate around the stationary and mysterious figure of a naked woman.

An ability to identify the potential of artists who have not reached maturity is one of the principal requirements of the contemporary collector, and this is illustrated in Guggenheim's case not only by her choice of Giacometti but also of Pollock, for, as Philip Rylands points out in the catalogue's introduction, she recognised his talent years before he painted the pictures for which he later became extraordinarily famous. One of these rather ungainly and certainly immature works is included in the exhibition: Direction (1945).

In contrast, Pollock's Enchanted Forest (1947) epitomises the style of his mature years: there is a combination of brush and dribble marks, patching and dripping, as the very diluted paint is applied to and soaks into an unprimed canvas. As you examine this striking work more closely, you gradually untangle the order of lines and marks from traces of overlapping and overpainting, but the effect of a dense forest remains unresolved.

Decades earlier, as Guggenheim herself relates, Duchamp had taught her the difference between abstraction and surrealism, but Pollock's action painting, inspired by surrealist automatism, was in a sense the resolution of that antimony; or, perhaps more precisely, a reduction of both to a final pictorial autism in which the world has disappeared and nothing remains but the action of the artist. Pollock's self-destruction through alcoholism and his premature death in a car accident seem perfectly consistent with the nihilism effectively articulated in his painting and concealed only by the desperate energy by which it is animated.

This is an exhibition that could have been better with a few additions and some omissions; but that would have presented a less complete picture of a collector's taste, with the hits and misses that are inevitable when one is dealing with current fashions and living personalities. We can look forward to the next of these annual shows; in the meantime, perhaps the new director could do something about the perversely confused and intensely annoying hanging of the works in the permanent collection.